I’ve used Wanikani about 1 year ago, got to lv.3 and stopped. Now I’m catching up on reviews and honestly just can’t seem to catch up in a way that creates meaningful learning.
My pile of reviews just don’t seem to end, and it often times feels more like 1st time learning than reviews, as I lost memory of many of those. Been like this for about 4 days, 30min ~ 1h / day.
When i do a lesson instead tbh it’s not very effective as the cards get lost in the middle of reviews.
So… my question is, should i bite the bullet and reset my level back to 0, power through the reviews for another week or so, … or something else?
To be honest, in general, that is not that bad. However, since you have been away for a considerable time and if you are an absolute beginner, you may benefit from doing the reset and go through it all again to reinforce what you learnt so far.
edit: if you do decide to stick with the reviews instead, I’d recommend not to do any lessons for the time being.
If you’re able to use scripts in your browser, the self-study script lets you review WK items filtered and sorted many different ways. So, you could do only levels 1-3 vocabulary pretty easily. (The reviews don’t count for progress though, only for extra study)
I would recommend against resetting. I mean worst case, next time you see a review for an item, consider it the lesson. Open the details page and read the whole thing. There, lesson done.
Sure, it won’t go back to Apprentice 2 and show back up in a few hours, but I think that would be too much anyway with this many. It’s like you’ve done way too many lessons at once. And if you keep failing it, it will end up back in Apprentice at some point anyway.
I wouldn’t reset over that. Just learn them over if you don’t remember them since you can access the item pages at any point.
Good tip for doing a lot of reviews is to not do lot of reviews at once. Do them as much as you feel like and then wrap up. Clearing just 5 reviews doesn’t seem like much but it does add up.
Most reviews I’ve done in a day was in Feb 19 2023 and that was 425 reviews in 2h 45m according to the timeline script. I also had a pile of 500+ reviews after my Japan trip and there sure was a lot of items I had to relearn. Going slowly will keep you from these mountains. Don’t take new lessons when you are over 50 apprentice items if you don’t want 100+ review piles.
I will only speak about the review number part of your issue.
If you’re getting overwhelmed with 115 reviews, then something needs to change, and that something in this case is either your expectations or your learning methodology.
WK is a Kanji learning app. The vocabulary is mainly used to reinforce the kanji that you learnt, so it is not always the most useful or practical. For general vocab learning, I think you might be better off with a general Anki deck.
Thanks for all responses here, i’ve learned a lot about the best ways of using Wanikani (and even what’s for tbh).
I was taking too many lessons because i felt like learning a lot, but indeed stuff wasn’t sticking, so i’ll be focusing on the review and smash 20 ~ 30 a day, so in about 1 week should be much more manageable.
